For a number of years now, my local theater chain has been running a best-picture festival before the Oscars. I’m critically aware enough to know that the Academy’s meritocracy is dubious at best, but it’s fun to hang out with other cinephiles and share our thoughts about the movies.

The movie theater business model has always been stupid. They make virtually nothing on ticket sales for blockbusters for much of its run, so they have to sell concessions at unreasonable prices (an affront to consumer value that I’ve always gotten around by just wearing cargo pants and buying snacks beforehand).

Unfortunately, you won’t be able to snap this one up in the soda aisle. Pepsi Apple Pie is only available via the #PepsiApplePieChallenge sweepstakes. Beginning today, fans can enter to win their own bottle of Pepsi Apple Pie on Pepsi Twitter or Pepsi TikTok. All you need to do is follow Pepsi, then submit a photo or…

Between my sister’s kids, my sister’s kids’ kids, and my friend’s kids, I really have enough vicarious experiences with children to get my fill. And I don’t have to live under the same roof with the brood, nor pay for their various expenses. Win-win for me as far as I’m concerned.

The touch pad joins the “We thought this was a nice feature that developers would find a lot of uses for” club. Sixaxis says “Welcome!”

My sympathies to your friend. I have no doubt his missives to his father are eloquent, but my experience is that any counterargument will fall on deaf ears when the person is that far on the fringe. As for the seemingly paradoxical notion of educated people falling for Trump’s particular brand of BS, it’s not unheard…

I’ve never not seen their “A Boy Named Goo” album in used CD racks. I presume it’s either “I bought this album for the single, but it turns out I didn’t like them enough for a full album of songs” or “I just broke up with my SO and this is one of the CDs left behind in my apartment”.

I’m still playing The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt*, because it’s no small game, especially if you have a compulsion to explore all the nooks and crannies, which are usually just crammed with monsters, treasure, or bandits (...but the true quest was the friends we made along the way!). And it just got a little longer, now…

I suppose there’s some contract with the theater chains that says they have to exhibit them in theaters for some time before even thinking of moving it to streaming/VOD/rental/etc. Still, I feel like films like this—comedies, especially those with an “indie” feel to them—would probably benefit the most from a…

They still didn’t really vote the way we wanted to, and we beat them anyway. So this entire genre of navel-gazing cultural anthropology, wherein we are urged to see things from the fascists’ point of view and accept that they’re the real victims, is now obsolete.

This was definitely a victory lap of an episode.  The show’s probably earned the right to slack off a bit at this point.

For the life of me, I’ve never been able to figure out what that Osborn (both Norman and Harry) hair is supposed to be:  A perm?  Wrong-way cornrows? A model of the stepped terrace farm fields in the Andes?

I arrived late to the last console generation and I’ll be late to this one, too. The Demon’s Souls is tempting, but it’ll take a lot more than that to make the jump.  I’ve got more than enough games on the PS4 and elsewhere to keep me sated for quite some time.

Samesies. I’ll stop playing it for awhile and then I’ll hit a lull in my game backlog—usually when I can’t figure out what to play next—and I’ll pick it up again.

Yeah, I’m much the same way.  I can never quite get away from the fact that all these sugar (or high-fructose corn syrup, if we’re being honest) replacements just don’t quite taste right.  It’s gotten better over the iterations--I recall Sweet ‘N Low used to have a really awful chemical aftertaste--but it never quite…

Honestly, I just wish Twitter had the backbone to just temporarily (or permanently) ban his account. Sure, most of his tweets are the inoffensive, well-composed ones that likely came from a staffer, but he shitposts/lies enough on Twitter that I figure they have every right as a business to do so. If a store had a…

I’d like to be more optimistic, but yeah, you’re not wrong. I still feel like we make a small amount of progress each generation, pushing society ever so slightly toward our better nature. Yeah, we will inevitably swing right back—as you say, it’s incredibly easy to exploit/give in to this kind of demagoguery—to all…

I’m honestly not making fun of the first letter writer (good for him!), but I couldn’t help but be reminded of this:

But I do think that progress is going to happen. It’s slower in this country, but it’s inevitable: The old ideas are going to die.

Pawn Stars: All The Presidents’ Pawn